State Spending on Higher Education

We’ll be headed to Harrisburg tomorrow for the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Pennsylvania (AICUP) Student Aid Advocacy Day. Please follow our live posts on Twitter (@CSC_Cubed)! We’re asking for more aid for middle income students – here’s our advocacy letter:

John Carey, the Chancellor of the Ohio Department of Higher Education, has written a guest column outlining the steps that the Buckeye State has taken to make college more affordable.

Ohio has increased spending on higher education by 8.5% and frozen tuition and fees at state supported schools for two years. Additional money has been appropriated to help underprivileged and under-represented students pay for tuition at community and four year colleges.

One of the biggest sources of increased debt for college students is not graduating on time. Ohio has tried to address this by devoting resources to helping students get college credit in high school and to creating guidelines for more skilled counselors to keep students on track for a four year graduation once they are in college.

Steve Esack of the Allentown Morning Call reports that House Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature are proposing a “bare-bones $28.6 billion ‘budget scenario'” for 2014-15. The plan is a response to a projected $1.3 billion budget shortfall faced by the Commonwealth by the end of the next budget cycle.

Among other things the House GOP proposal includes

Five percent cuts in all state departments — with the exception of reductions to basic education, special education, preschools, state-funded universities and the state’s college loan program.

According to Budget Secretary Charles Zogby, Governor Corbett

does not support a bare-bones budget that removes proposals he made in February to spend $400 million more for public education, create a $25 million college scholarship for middle class students and $5.4 million more to reduce the waiting list for disabled adults to find community-based homes.

CSCubed applauds the House GOP plan’s preservation of existing funding for education. However, with college tuition and student debt both undergoing dramatic increases we stand with Governor Corbett’s proposals to raise education funding. We are particularly supportive of the $25 million Ready to Succeed Scholarship (RTSS) program. RTSS has been CSCubed’s #1 priority for the past two years. For more information on RTSS please click here.

For those of you that enjoy the musical stylings in Les Miserables as much as I do, there is quote sung by Enjolras during the revolution that can help to inspire hope into our noble cause of lowering the college cost for Middle Income Families. In the hope to inspire his men, Enjolras sings “We are not alone, the people too most rise.” This quote can serve in a way to reflect what must be done by college students in regards to college cost. CSCubed is not the only group that wants to challenge the rising college cost in America. Students from Babson College, Emmanuel College, Merrimack College, and Newbury College all went to the Massachusetts’ State House the other day in order to lobby for more funding towards the ever growing college cost. Students there were lobbying for $9 to $10 million to be added on to the state’s financial aid budget. This stand by the students in Massachusetts offers a similar situation done by the students involved with CSCubed. The push towards helping Middle Income families afford college is ever evident in modern day America. If college students can band together and lobby for reforms in the area, much can be done about college cost. But, the people most join together. To learn more about the Massachusetts’ student led lobbying efforts click on the link below.